Latin American Populism: Tentative Reflections for a Global Historiographical Perspective

Résumés

Latin American populism has usually been considered as an integrationist strategy towards the urban working classes in the context of mass democracy and import substitution industrialization. Among its features, the following ones can be identified: support from the working classes, charismatic leadership, nationalism and anti-intellectualism, anti-communism, state-centered conception of historical change, and corporatism. Recent writings influenced by the “linguistic” and “cultural” turns, despite their different social ontologies, also proclaim Latin American populisms’ peculiarity. In these cases the notion of “political style” prevails over socio-economic explanations. The available investigations are often based on national experiences or comparative approaches among two (or three) cases like Peronism and Varguism, or Cardenism. In so doing they provide a catalogue of “populisms” instead of a common understanding of the so called “Latin American” populism. This paper aims to review the very question of “Latin American populism” from a critical understanding of a global historiographical perspective. From this complex point of view it will be argued that historical analysis requires a globalizing critique of the prevailing social theory, and of the often implicit historiographical assumptions. The core of the argumentation will be focused on the Western distinction between state politics and civil society.

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1The notion of populism has had an extended relevance in the social and historical research about Latin American history during the twentieth century. It remains today in everyday political languages as well as in the conceptual toolkit of the social sciences and humanities. “Latin American populism” as an expression has been extensively used in investigations produced in Latin American countries, the United States and Europe, concerning several political regimes in the subcontinent. In spite of the alleged notion, the concept and its empirical content are far from clear. The use of “Latin American populism” oscillates between too general statements about its common features and an enumeration of national cases. I will develop the hypothesis that a global historiographical perspective can help to grasp the basic dilemmas of Latin American populism. Instead of resolving the challenge of giving a historical definition of my subject I would like to open the discussion for future debates.

2My argument will follow three steps. First, it will develop a theoretical understanding of what would be a global-historical perspective from a Latin American point of view. It will be crucial to inscribe there our proposal of a global historiographical representation of Latin American populism. Secondly, I will show the relevance of a progressivist notion of History as a conceptual framework of sociological and economic theories of Latin American populism. I will emphasize the ahistorical trend of the competing explanations based on the theory of discourse and of the “political style”. Finally I will address the specificity of the regional populism from a global historiographical approach mentioning the critique of the State / civil society divide effective in recent research.

3“Global history” is just one of the disciplinary designations of the search for a method suited for post-national historical research. “World history”, “International history”, “Transnational history”, “Connected History”, “Histoire croisée”, and others are available on the historiographical market. I do not have enough space here to assess the vast historiographical and theoretical debates concerning these different approaches.1 But I prefer to use the notion of global history because it shows in a clearer way the increasing interconnectedness of the world via the constitution of a global market. It relegates to the past the efforts to build world history upon the expansion of a culture, a power and an economic interest. This was the main feature of world history’s classic book: The Rise of the West.2 Christopher A. Bayly’s work on The Birth of the Modern World can be regarded as the prototype of the new global history.3 In sharp contrast with Eric Hobsbawm’s saga about of the capitalist transformation of the world’s revolutionary path,4 Bayly’s narrative uses a pluralist method that conceives “capitalism” as a form of exchange expanded all around the world during the last centuries. Unfortunately we stand only at the beginning of a situated reflection on the characteristics of a possible Latin American global history. I claim that it is required to think about the interpretive consequences of a global history of Latin American populism.

4In order to contribute to that objective, in this section I will summarize some theoretical-conceptual notions I developed in a longer argument elsewhere.5 My main point is that we cannot advance in the development of an agenda for future research without a debate about the notion of what we understand under the label of “capitalism”. In this sense, even if the theoretical divergence was not clearly stated when all these works were written, the Hobsbawm-Bayly alternative remains the kernel of the crossroads of the field: is capitalism 1) a system of production producing forms of capital valorization or is it 2) a merchant ideology moved by interests related to different factors among which the economic is just one? Certainly, the disagreement is not related to economicism but to the opposition between a logic of capital permeating the differences (Hobsbawm) and the pluralism of explanations undermining the appearance of a single unification (Bayly). Of course I cannot go further in such a still open-ended debate. Notwithstanding the schematic aspect of the proposal, I will sketch a general chronology of Latin American globalizing streams, in which we can place the emergence of populism.

5The possibility of a history of Latin American globalizations depends on the validation of a peculiar chronology of Latin American transformations in the longue durée, connected to the global movements and distinct from them as well. In my view the periods of global interactions and contacts –conceptualized here as globalizing streams– were five.

6 See Nina Jablonsky (ed.), The First Americans. The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World, San F (...)

6The first globalizing stream begun around fifteen thousand years ago. At that time one branch of the huge migrations departed from Africa around eighty five thousand years before touched the northern lands of North America and started a settlement process all along the continent. During the next fourteen thousand years and more, different social and cultural forms emerged from migration and adaptation to American environments from Alaska to Patagonia.6 The historical progressions of these populations differed strongly. They developed techniques of agriculture and cattle raising, built cities and implemented commerce and war. In some cases, as the Aztecs and the Incas, they created kingdoms.

7The second globalizing stream, conceptualized by Immanuel Wallerstein as the entering in the capitalist world-system, took place between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century.7 Its central features included European conquest, land occupation, evangelic acculturation, demographic collapse and exploitation of native labor and primary resources. It was also the period of importation of enslaved people from Africa. The hybrid and complex nature of the subcontinent was produced along the centuries through an extensive ethnic mixture and the application of racial classification. Commercial capitalism articulated with colonialism advanced differently in North America and in Spanish and Portuguese possessions. America was structured into the two subcontinents that remain with few –but not unimportant– vicissitudes until today.

8The third globalizing stream happened between the explosive cycle of Independence revolutions during the early nineteenth century and the economic and political organization of the new postcolonial nations. The mentioned cycle belonged to the Atlantic wave of revolutions from 1776 to 1848.8 After the crisis of the colonial powers, Europe persisted as a fundamental agent in the local situations. The anticolonial revolutions were largely republican (the exception being the Brazilian empire). New national states were built after the fragmentation of the enormous viceroyalties of the Spanish empire.

9The fourth globalizing stream unfolded from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Latin American countries were usually imagined and shaped as such within the international division of economic production, structuring the dependency logics prevailing in the economic history of the region until nowadays. The huge international migrations modified the ethnic classifications and racial imagination, however, emphasizing their hybrid demographic configurations.9 One of their consequences was the birth of cultural nationalism. It was also the age of the making of social classes strongly interconnected with ethnic and gender hierarchies. During the twentieth century Latin America became the most unequal continent of the world. A long chronicle of authoritarian governments, social revolutions and populisms was the sign of a very complex political history. This political cycle was barred during the decades of 1960, 1970 and even in the 1980 by brutal military dictatorships usually functional to the American and Western European side in the Cold War.

10The fifth globalizing stream matches with the worldwide triumph of capitalism and the expansion of liberal democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the so called real socialism. In Latin America it was first identified with neoliberalism and the Washington consensus.10 In reality, the neoliberal agenda was introduced by the already mentioned military dictatorships and implemented by democratic government in the eighties and nineties. Towards the year 2000, the neoliberal program was in a profound crisis all over the subcontinent, generating popular mobilizations and reformist alliances. But globalization was not considered as a synonym of neoliberalism anymore.11 Perhaps the current debate in many situations in Latin America is not to reject globalization as such but to discuss which globalization is appropriate for a more democratic and fair cooperative international community. The last feature of the fifth globalizing stream is the renaissance of the idea of a Latin American community forgotten after the fragmentation of the colonial space in first third of the nineteenth century.

11To outline the last two streams I would say that migrations, capitalism and ideas were the three main drivers of late Latin American globalizations. Each one should be studied in the context of global fluctuations of people, of capital, and of cultural hegemonies, in connection with other issues like war and diseases. But the internal dynamics of Latin American history in the long run, the intricacies of its populations and struggles should be considered too. So, the “big questions” of a global history require a historiographical research of the nuances of historical experience.

12 A general orientation among the bibliography on Latin American populism can be found in the followi (...)

12I can now discuss perspectives on Latin American Populisms. Let us begin with the two main explanations: on the one hand, social and economic analysis of their conditions and determinations; on the other hand, discursive and political analysis of the divide among the people and the oligarchy or plutocracy.12

13The social and economic explanation usually takes the 1929 crisis as a point of departure to describe the conditions for massive emergence of the working classes in the growing urban situations. It is then possible to articulate urbanization, internal mass migrations, political instability, state interventionism in the economy, import substituting industrialization (ISI), and more specifically political consequences: nationalism, inward-oriented growth, income redistribution, personal leadership, disposable mass support for inclusive policies and leaderships. Concerning the political style of power and state relations in populist regimes, this explanation finds paternalistic, personalistic, often charismatic leadership and mobilization from the top down, employing rhetorical, emotional interpellations, and symbols, designed to inspire the mobilization of “the people” against its oppressors. It also presents a narrative of longue durée that surpasses the scope of the century, implicating new features: the tradition of “caudillismo” (clearly present in sociological approaches based in modernization theories). Concerning the social content or base of populism, the economic and social perspective stresses the importance of internal migrations and rapid urbanization, the lack of political experience and organizational skills among the new urban masses, and perhaps differences compared to the old working class, politically educated in the socialist, communist or anarchist programs. Thus populism can be understood as heterogeneous social coalitions, multiclass incorporation of the masses, especially urban workers but also middle sectors; the populist alliance is usually led by leaders of middle or upper strata origins. What is essential to note is the periodization related to this perspective. Because of its articulation with the structural requirements of the ISI the period 1930-1970 appears as the chronological range of the populist stage.13

14Let us now see the main traits of the discursive and political interpretation of Latin American populism. Even if this approach can find precedents in previous times (for instance in the Mexican revolutionary forces of 1910, or in the Argentine Yrigoyenismo of the same period) the clearest interpretations take the hegemonic crisis in the thirties as a point of departure. They point to the crucial context of de-legitimation of traditional ruling elites or classes, and consequently the possibility of emergence of an anti-status quo leadership against the “oligarchy”, “the politicians” or “imperialism”. They do not deny the relevance of the social and economic aspects, but make the core of populism rest on aptitudes to organize the political field in two halves, the popular and the anti-popular. For this reason the chronological coverage is clearly different from the other explanation. In fact, it can comprehend all Latin American history since independence (the already present notions of “caudillismo” and the “hispanic” and “catholic” heritage are crucial here), but mostly from the 1930’s to our days. In other words, it is possible from this perspective to talk about populism and neopopulism, including Chávez’ and Morales’ political styles.14

15 Ernesto Laclau, The Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2005.

15Different features characterize these competing perspectives. The main problem about social and economic explanation resides in its top-down conception of politics, where it is not easy to understand the activation of lower classes –even if domination concerning political and social power should not be forgotten–, a crucial aspect of Latin American populism. Moreover, the political realm is considered as a “black box”: we know the inputs and the outputs, but we cannot see the construction of political preferences. The main problem of the “political” explanation resides in the lack of historicity, of contingence and people’s participation. In some cases (clearly in Ernesto Laclau’s book on the “populist reason”15), Latin American features are melted in the sea of “the political”.

16Thus, it is not possible to cope with the challenge of global history if we remain attached to the competing explanations for Latin American populism. In the first case because it appears as an effect of structural changes without political singularities; in the second case because it rejects historical particularity.

17From the liberal-democratic perspective, the incompatibility of associational practices and populism was stated. This was clear in State- or leader-centered approaches. For instance, in Argentina, a hegemonic bibliography related to the “sectores populares” and “democracy” asserted a gap between previous rich associative life (unions, mutual help societies, cultural centres, libraries, migrants associations, etc.) before, and impoverished associationism after the first Peronism (1945-1955). This period was considered as the realm of a society oppressed by an authoritarian state. As a consequence, association was declared impossible and investigation of it remained superfluous. However, new research has shown the richness of associative life during the period, that was seized by Peronism as an object of political action, but where the articulation of neighborhood and politics remained alive. It has also shown the relevance of this associative life to understand specific aspects of populist politics. There was an active associative life in the Peronist years. It implied something very different than the abatement or downfall of associations caused by authoritarian pressure from the State: it multiplied and extended in all the country (including countryside). Peronist government was interested in the occupation of civil associations, which were considered as sites of power: unions, branches of the Peronist Party in every neighborhood, school cooperatives, libraries, etc. Local demands were expressed by these complex associations: roads, schools, bridges, telephones, sewage, football clubs, etc.16 Comparative research from a global perspective is helpful here: the relationship between associations and populism, or between associative life and non liberal political programs, has been proved in different cases that allow global connections of a deep affinity between mass democracy and associative life, regardless of the ideological assertions about the primacy of the state. However, radicalization of statist programs ends up discouraging or repressing the associations in favor of state power. Populism in Latin America never ended eliminating the associative life because in any case –even the Varguist Estado Nôvo– democratic backing was completely restrained.

18In Brazil, during the forties and fifties, a rich associative life in working-class and migrant neighborhoods of industrial São Paulo has been researched by young scholars.17 From this work associative life in the local spaces can be articulated with social and cultural demands, and the political participation. It is not social history separated from politics. On the contrary, local experiences of class and labor realities have complex relations with populist leaders (Getúlio Vargas, Jânio Quadros, Ademar Barros) and the left. In the case of Argentine recent research, these investigations go beyond the autonomy/heteronomy scheme that presided older interpretations.

19The main theoretical characteristic of these works resides in the questioning of the traditional conceptual divide between the social and the political, or the society and the state. They can be thus related to a general “gramscian” perspective, even if some of the researchers would like to be represented by Gramsci’s ideas and other not. In my own work I have borrowed the concept of “political society” from Partha Chatterjee’s elaborations for the Indian postcolonial situation.18 I think that it is possible to find a convergence with the new Brazilian investigation on populism. The Western conceptual categorization thus reveals its peculiarity and the use of global references begins to open the agenda for a global historiography. It seems clear to me that the global analysis is not a matter of “scale” because it implies a theoretical criticism of general categories. The problem does not reside in the generality of the concept, but in the homogeneous categorization of the unequal times concomitant in the streams of the historical expansion of capitalism. The dialectic between similarity and difference in historical situations requires a critique of the inherited concepts.

19 W. John Green, Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization in Colombia, Gainesville: Univ (...)

20I am perfectly aware of the hesitant and incomplete scope of this discussion. It would be possible to expand the references, for instance, to Mexican cardenism, strongly based in the corporative organization of working class and peasantry. It would be worth discussing the associative groundwork that was beginning to be interrelated with Gaitanismo until 1948 in Colombia, because it shows similarities with the cases previously commented, in spite of strong national differences.19 Something different can be said about the Dominican regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo between the thirties and the late fifties, whose hegemony was strongly related to state attitude towards the sugar planters and the peasants. But in this case the peculiarities of the Dominican Republic blocked all possibilities of an active civil society. Trujillo’s direct presence in the public realm coexisted with the peasant recognition of social and cultural measures of the administration. Robert Lee Turits’ outstanding research on the topic is useful for our purposes because of his confidence in the notion of modernization to explain the historical change in the Dominican Republic.20 I think that the premise of modernization was the main obstacle to study correctly the global place of Latin American populism because it implied the unilinear tendency towards a “modern” society considered from a North American and European imagined model of development.21

21What is clear is the relevance of populism in Latin America to face the problems raised by the agricultural crisis of the first third of the twentieth century and the industrialization induced by the state. In other words, it seems to belong to the innovations induced by the fourth globalizing stream of Latin American perspective in a global history. However the functional explanation seems unable to describe the contingence of political identification. I think that a global historical approach could help us to avoid the divide between the socio-economic and the political-ideological interpretations because it situates the populist moment in singular streams of globalizing tendencies as a singular segment of global history. What should never be forgotten is that the global historiographical approach is a theoretically informed point of view generated during the last two streams of the globalizing process. In other words, despite the temptation of reifying global history as an objective reality, it is a retrospective reconstruction from the point of view of the current conceptual framework shaped in the context of an actually global capitalist world.

22The global resemblances of peculiar populist realities in Latin America are thus historically situated –undermining the ahistorical consequences of purely discursive approach– but the comparative analysis can provide insights about the singularity of the identificatory processes relating the local cases with other continental experiences. In other words, only a global historiographical perspective is competent to surpass the well-known Scylla of the list of national cases and the Charybdis of a block of undifferentiated populism.

21 On the political-interpretive implication of the modernization theory, see: Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology. American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000; Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003; David C. Engerman et al., Staging Growth. Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.